Warriors: Stars Burn Out
by star wars for Jesus
Summary: Seven months after the events of "Warriors: Across The Stars", Jayfeather finds himself questioning everything-including Starclan.


"_I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer."—C.S. Lewis_

Seven Moons Later

Silent—that's what they are. Wordless. Voiceless. Always watching, their lidless eyes stretched wide to drink in the toils of earth, but never bothering to offer a response. To say anything, offer some explanation for every bloody, rapacious day under the sun.

And no, I'm not referring to the Dark Forest. Or even to evil itself. No, I'm talking about what's probably hovering above me, their glinting, silver hearts hidden from my sightless eyes, their ears forever clamped tight to my silent pleas.

I'm talking about Starclan.

As a faint breeze moans through the trees above—I can hear their leaves rustling, can feel their bark brush my flank—I turn my gaze to what's most likely a night sky. An inky black panorama that closely echoes my waking world. That mirrors my dreams during Starclan's silence, their bright, star-smattered faces veiled behind swaths of clouds ebony and deep.

I'm fine with the silence, though. Really, I am. It's just that when the world has torn in two, when reality itself is left hanging in bloody tatters…well, I'd like some answers. Any answer. Even a "_this is all your fault, Jayfeather"_ would suffice; after all, I'm not sure that's not entirely untrue.

Maybe…

No. No, I didn't. I didn't cause this, didn't spit in the face of Starclan and warrant some due punishment. Didn't turn my back on them like they have done to me, their looming gazes unblinking as my very existence drifts slowly away.

At the heart of the flame, my sole accusation burns a hot white: _they let her. _Let her die. Let her bleed out onto the hard earth, its crimson tide filling the air with the stench of death, and they never said a word. As always, they were silent, wordless—and utterly, utterly powerless.

They let Briarlight die.

The operating word being _let_, which is probably the cruelest aspect of this entire affair. If they had struck her down, afflicted her with greencough or simply written her out of existence, then I might've understood—sort of. But standing back, wiping their paws clean of her while her life seeped into the ground? It's unbearable—evil, even, because I know they might've had the power to save her. To staunch the blood and allow her another scant paw-full of the curse-blessing we call life.

_Might've_ had the power.

But even before this, before Briarlight had been ripped—no, _shredded_-from this world into another, she had already been gone. She'd been alive, yes. Had been breathing and seeing and laughing, but something in her mind had been slowly dragging her away, warping her till she was hardly recognizable. Till she was no longer Briarlight.

In her last few months in this world, Briarlight had descended into madness.

It'd started out innocently enough, with her ominous dreams. Then she'd been sharing things with me, terrible, dreadful things that reeked of the Dark Forest but looked for all the world like Starclan, that had gone against everything I know to be true. That had spoken of some place beyond the stars, beyond time and memory and memories of time. The place where you went after you faded from Starclan's brilliant ranks, your gleaming, rippling pelt dancing with lights unquenchable.

Firestar had wound up there, she'd claimed. And Sandstorm. And Spottedleaf, who's sensuous, ethereal frame haunted Firestar's path till she'd faded, erased from the stars by raking claws and pouring blood.

But compared with her other claims, that idea seems halfway sane. Lucid. Believable, even, if her mind's unraveling had stopped there, halted its maddening whirlwind.

She'd believed she was having my kits.

Now, Briarlight's always been a friend of mine, a close, close one. But for her to be anything more than that to me…I would've had to forget. Would've had to cease to remember my own illicit parentage and all the pain it's wrought. All the mistrust and relationships that still go un-mended, unhealed.

It would've made me like my mother, Leafpool.

That's something I'll never be able to bring myself to become, to be molded into. And it's something I couldn't do then, either: I couldn't love Briarlight, couldn't be what she'd fantasized me being. Couldn't father her kits, watch them grow strong under the leave-laden arms of the forest. Even if it'd meant saving her, rescuing her from herself.

In the end, the most tragic thing about Briarlight's death is that in the end, she really _had_ been pregnant. They weren't mine—that would've been echoing my mother's mistakes, would've been forging a path that never allows things to be undone. But they were _there._ They were real, tangible. Alive and writhing in their own fluids as their mother bled rivers onto the thirsty, thankless ground.

But even the stars above seem to be blind to the identity of the father.

I have my suspicions, of course. And I have my intuitions, their sharp whiskers probing for a shadow of truth—but I don't have anything substantial. It's all doubts, nagging voices that hint of something far darker—far more terrible, far more dreadful—than Briarlight's delusions.

In my mind, sanity pulls away to suggest that a warrior of Starclan—a dead cat, a spirit—fathered those kits.

Except—that's impossible, right? They're spirits, these beings, are devoid of all flesh and bone. Which might be why they're so aloof, so distant from us: as ethereal, spectral creatures, they might've lost their capacity to feel the day their bodies died. Might've lost of memory of what is to suffer, their gazes hollow as they keep their silent watch over the Clans.

Yet somehow I feel that my hunch—however far-fetched, however ludicrous—is dead-on. It's right, painfully so. It's just that…well, I'm not certain a warrior of Starclan would even woo a living, breathing cat. I mean, it has to be against one of their unspoken laws, one of their archaic, sacred tenets that must not be broken. Ever.

If it's not a Starclan cat, then I shudder to imagine what sort of creature Briarlight was consorting with. To try and seduce a live cat—especially a _medicine cat_—wouldn't be a hapless act for a sinister spirit, after all: he'd have to possess an ulterior motive. A very, very deep passion for something that only she could bring him…whatever that was. For something raw and bestial and unbelievably wicked.

An evil cat doesn't merely consummate a relationship: he _consumes. _Jaws gaping wide, he devours. And he gorges himself, wolfing down the object of his affections as if she were a particularly tasty morsel.

He loves and loathes her—brutally.

Yet Starclan never put a stop to that. Not once. They simply loomed over us all, their roving gazes drinking in her demise but never raising a paw to intervene.

And if he continues to ravage her there, in Starclan's hunting grounds…I can't say that I know what'll become of her, either. She might simply vanish, fade out of memory and space and time. Or she'll make the leap to another world, that "place beyond memory" she'd ached for with all her heart, and that'll be the end. Beginning. Whatever.

Tilting my head once more toward the sky, I let out a hiss of frustration. Either way, I doubt I'll ever know for sure. Because even I die, if I one day meet her in some far, starlit country, she might've already vanished. Disappeared. Been escorted into either a void or some farther land, some distant realm even Briarlight couldn't guess at.

I have this notion that Starclan won't tell me, either. They'll be where they've always been: hiding behind the stars. Listening, but never giving us much chance to listen back.

If I had never watched them scintillate in my dreams, I might actually believe that there is no such thing as the stars.

When the world has sung her final crescendo, it's my bet that the stars'll go with it. They'll end. They'll burn, burn out, their fiery entrails ablaze with inevitable doom, and they'll take memory with them as well. Perhaps even matter will follow suit—but I'm pretty Starclan isn't nearly that potent. Just take Briarlight's dimming _coda,_ for example.

My only hope, I guess, isn't really placed in Starclan. Or even in Briarlight, for that matter—after all, she could be anywhere right now, could even be nonexistent. Rather, all my dreams and fears and longings now rest with the father of Briarlight's kits—and whether or not he's really the bestial, gluttonous beast I've imagined him as.

Because…well, maybe he's something glorious, splendorous beyond compare.

Because maybe the reason the stars offer no answer is that the answers are already there. Written in their faces. Shining in their simple, white majesty.

Maybe they themselves are the answer.


End file.
